#098: The "Happy Head"

Hello everyone and thanks for tuning in to The Left of Greg podcast. I am Brian Marren, the host and creator of the show. As always, I will be joined by human behavior expert Mr. Greg Williams, who the show is affectionately named after. Here on The Left of Greg show, our goal is to increase your advanced critical thinking ability through a better understanding of what we call human behavior, pattern recognition, and analysis. If you'd like to find out more about what that is, you can check out our website at arcadiacognorati.com or by following us on Facebook at HBPRA. Please help support the show by checking out our Patreon site where for just a few dollars you can have access to all kinds of episode extras, videos, and short tutorials that are updated weekly. Just click the link in the episode details that says support the show and we'll take you directly to that site. If you have any questions or would like us to cover a specific topic, please reach out to us at leftofgreg at gmail.com. On today's episode, Greg and I are talking about another Greggism called the Happy Head. The Happy Head affects all humans and it especially affects us during exciting events like the robbery and shooting spree that we bring up during the episode, or even while Greg is attempting new parkour moves. During these events we often outrun our headlights because we don't realize that we've lost our critical thinking abilities. We also discuss how humans first learn, then test, then push their boundaries. Please don't forget to follow us on social media. You can find the links in the episode details and if you enjoy the podcast, please tell your friends about it. Thanks for tuning in and we hope you enjoy the show.

Arcadia is going to do that next, and I've got my virtual Jenga that we're going to play.

Virtual Jenga. On that note, Greg, good morning. Let's go ahead and get started with today's recording. And once again, folks, if you are just listening, you can always follow me on Facebook as we hop on here and live stream it a whole bunch sometimes too. So today's topic is we're going to be talking about the Happy Head as we refer to it. Now, why don't you real quick, Greg, before we jump into that, give us a real quick definition of what we mean by the Happy Head.

Simple — I'll street it down. A Happy Head is when you're driving too fast, you outrun your headlights, and your common sense and your impulse control don't jump in and stop you. So I'll give you a real quick example. Back at East Detroit High School, we were the Mini Jets playing football, the little kids up and coming, and the family that lives two doors down from me — Joni and Janie and Danny and Donald — he worked for the Anheuser-Busch distributor, coolest family. Their little brother Danny was running around in the bleachers and the mom and dad were tired of him and said go down behind the bleachers. So he went down behind the bleachers and everybody was playing grab-ass, and he ran and he clotheslined himself right at this height with one of the metal bars that comes across and knocked him out. He had to go get stitches — you could see the scar well into his high school years. The idea was that he was goofing around like an idiot and didn't notice the severity of the situation unfolding in front of him. And we all do that sometimes — we do that as little kids riding a bike, sometimes we do that as adults driving in a car. So the Happy Head is whenever you allow your impulse control or self-control to take a back seat and you do something that you know, or should have known, was going to get you in a trick bag.

And you brought in a couple different examples because we see it with people not thinking — we always do the "how did that happen" or "that escalated quickly" or "man, one thing led to another." That's kind of what we mean by the Happy Head. So it could be a positive, it could be a negative — you're having so much fun, you're having some drinks, and you're not even realizing it, and all of a sudden you fall or something stupid happens. Hey, you got the Happy Head. You weren't thinking. Looking back you go, wow, that's so obvious, I should have seen it. And the Happy Head comes from electrochemical neurotransmitters. I'm so hooked on that dopamine that I'm feeling, I'm so up and excited about whatever's going on that critical thinking never came in and I never stopped and said, hey, wait a minute. And you talk about impulse control, and obviously that changes over time with your age and everything, but this affects everyone. It affects criminals on the street, the cops chasing the criminals. Whatever's going on in your life, it could be just a really fun event — you're having fun with your friends on the weekend and then all of a sudden it turns into, hey, let's do this. Or, hey, we're just heading down the road, we can pile in the bed of the pickup truck, and then, oh, now we're doing this.

What's the worst that could happen?

We did what we did in high school with a buddy — he had an El Camino and we'd ride in the back. We did what we called Mino Grinds, where he would come up to this intersection, and on the street there was a concrete divider that went up like two feet high, almost like on a highway, but it started out at street level and then raised up. So he would put two wheels, one side of the El Camino, up on the concrete barrier while we'd be riding in the back, and then slam back down — just like you're doing a grind on your skateboard, but with a vehicle.

With a 6,000-pound piece of metal. But Brian, you brought two incredibly great points together right with that story. I wrote down the one word: euphoria. When euphoria hits us, it's fed by the electrochemical neurotransmitters you talked about. All of a sudden we get epinephrine and adrenaline and all these other things that make us feel wonderful. So you could be a criminal and you escape the grab of that cop during a foot chase and all of a sudden you feel superhuman. Or you can feel like that in the back of that pickup truck — you never think about what happens if you break an axle or pop a tie rod and go into a ravine or something. So those are the exact type of situations we want to showcase today — first to show people how easy it is for that to happen, and second, maybe a strategy, a way ahead, out of falling for it.

So I'll jump in with this example out of Arizona recently — this was back in September. A great example of a criminal getting the Happy Head and continuing on with their spree. This guy basically went on a, what, over the course of four days crime spree in the Mesa-Chandler area of Arizona. I think he was charged with 19 felony charges, but basically it started with him shooting at two victims outside of a sports grill, then went down and robbed someone at gunpoint and took their vehicle, so we had a carjacking at that point, continued on and robbed a barbecue joint and accosted some of the people there. Not long after that, police officers found the vehicle he had stolen because it had completely run out of gas — found it unoccupied, out of gas, full of barbecue wrappers from the barbecue place, which means he ate in the vehicle too. He continued up into another area, stole another pickup truck, and he had a backpack he tried to put in the bed of the pickup truck, not realizing there was a hole in the bed where his backpack fell through. Inside that backpack there was a whole bunch of incriminating evidence that tied him to the previous crimes. They found that pickup truck abandoned, then he robbed someone else at gunpoint — it was actually a home robbery at that point, he got into the guy's home and robbed him. Then he went to a grocery store, robbed another person, went to another neighborhood where he stole a vehicle at gunpoint. So basically he's just going from one auto theft to eating, to robbing, run out of gas, grab some food — he just continues this crime spree. Then he stole some credit cards, bought some more stuff, continued, ended up in a hotel, barricaded himself in the room, a SWAT team had to come, and he eventually surrendered peacefully at that motel. He walked up, shot some people, then he had to get out of there, saw a vehicle and took it, got hungry, figured he could rob the place and not have to pay, and continued down from there. I would call this the definition of what we would call at-bang thinking. Everything in his life is right here in front of him — that's the only thing he can think. There was a complete and total lack of any type of critical thinking, let alone advanced critical thinking.

Brian, we talk about — if you're writing a manifesto, or know of someone who is, danger, warning, Will Robinson, start calling, put 9-1 and hold your finger over the one. If you find that your life is remarkably like the script of Steven Seagal's Out for Justice — you know, who shot Bobby Lupo — horrible accent, I still remember that line from that movie. It's called criminal mischief. We have this long criminal episode that ebbs and flows and then just never ends. And like the first vehicle that our miscreant drove until it was out of gas and then finally abandons to steal another one — he's out of gas in the hotel and goes, ah, the jig's up, come and get me, copper. Instead of going out like White Heat — you know, top of the world, Ma — why didn't he go out that way? Well, there's a lot going on in there, but you got to remember that just like that gas tank, each one of those incidents gives him a little more bravado, and a little more, and a little more. Now he's in a crappy hotel room somewhere sitting with barbecue sauce dried on his shirt and his fingers. He's got one bullet left and he goes, well, I've had a ball — I'm certainly not going to shoot myself. You pegged it when you said not only do we have a lack of impulse control, but there is no forward thinking, there are no spirals, there is no critical thinking. So you can't have advanced critical thinking without critical thinking. What separates the two, Brian — critical thinking gets us through life normally, saying alligator in doorway one, lion in doorway two, doorway three looks pretty breezy so I'm going to take doorway three. Advanced critical thinking is how the hell did a crocodile and a lion get in my house? I better button up those windows. One thinking human can predict when that's going to happen, or see it in progress and stop it — but the person involved in it generally cannot. So if it's euphoria born out of fun, we've got to be able to rein it in — drinking, partying, a wedding — or if it's a criminal episode like this, we've got to nip it in the bud, because they leave charred corpses in their wake. The gift of time and distance makes us think about those things, and it slows it down. That's what the hotel gave this person. The hotel and the SWAT team outside gave this person the time to think and go, okay, this is going to end poorly, I'll likely die here — and then he did the cost-benefit analysis and said no.

That's a good point — everything else is happening kind of in real time as he goes along. And then he gets to the hotel, like you said, he's got a belly full of food, SWAT team shows up, now he can't go anywhere. So now he actually has to turn his brain on for a second and go, damn, what am I going to do now?

That escalated rather quickly.

That escalated quickly. And that's an example of how a criminal operates — it's very much just, oh, it's a Family Guy bit, ooh a piece of candy, ooh a piece of candy, ooh a piece of candy. He's going to keep doing that until the situation changes. He's just going to continue down that path until something happens with the environment or something else. It could have been as simple as, damn, I'm tired, I want to go get some sleep, there's a motel, I'm going to check in. That's literally as much thinking as he probably ever did during these situations.

The more time, the better — time plays against the criminal and also wisens up the euphoric. So let's talk about just a couple of brief ones, Brian, that I saw in my career as a copper. I remember a videotape of a bank robbery in St. Clair Shores where, when the bank robbery suspect left the building — the cops were sneaking up on the building, and it was one-way glass where the reflections made the cops clearly visible from the inside sneaking up — so the guy bails, and when he gets outside he's so happy he bailed that he ripped his mask off and slammed it like he was in the NFL Super Bowl making a touchdown. They were able to tie that guy back to the crime. Bank robbers using their own deposit slip as the hold-up note — we thought about everything else but we didn't think about putting our name and address on the slip. And then a criminal one that I saw: there was a stabbing so horrific that the person used a French knife from the kitchen and stabbed repeatedly. Usually when you get that high a number of stab wounds you know it's somebody that's related — they cover the face, one of those things. And the person stabbed so much, Brian, that they nicked themselves countless times on the blade, but the adrenaline didn't let them feel the pain. Their DNA was at the crime scene, and then during the interview the next day with their hand wrapped like a catcher's mitt, they're telling a detective they were at home last night. Those types of things happen often because when we're in the moment, we don't think ourselves out of the moment — we don't prioritize the information coming in, and that's the key.

The guy from Arizona is a perfect example of how he went from one place to another, and you get those high adrenaline, high dopamine kicks. There's no critical thinking going on whatsoever, and then your body starts to process that — those chemical levels start to go down, and now you get hungry, you get tired, and he literally followed that pattern and always fell back on what he knew. It's this constant ebb and flow, but at the extremes: I'm amped up, I'm robbing the place, I'm stealing a car, I'm shooting it up — and then all the way down: I'm hungry, I'm tired, I'm going to a motel. It's literally like dealing with a three-year-old child who's screaming that they're furious, and then two seconds later is laughing about something. That emotional range is exactly what we're talking about here.

AARP — of which I'm a member, thank you for reminding me. Happy Veterans Day, by the way, and happy USMC birthday. AARP had a great article that I read in its entirety, and it was talking about your grandchildren and your children and how they approach driving.

Mine specifically? I don't think I have grandchildren yet.

Well, DNA says otherwise, Brian. But the idea is you have a kid who wants to drive the car on their own, and you keep telling them no, I'll go with you. So the kid goes out on their own. Remember the euphoria that goes along with that — they've got the happy head. So they decide they're going to do everything right: ten and two, checking their mirrors. Then all of a sudden they see their buddy on a street corner, that buddy leads them to another group of friends, now there's nine of them in the car, they turn up the bass and they're jamming. With each one of those critical decisions, the risk grows immensely. When they're alone, less chance of an accident. When they're with one person, it triples. When they're with two or more people of their age group, it quadruples. And it keeps growing when the music is louder than normal. If you could show your kid how that works — with a cave painting or a PowerPoint — you'd hope they'd go, wow, and take it seriously and say, I can control my own destiny. We know kids have to learn the hard way sometimes, but scar tissue doesn't have to be a gravesite.

The kid examples are great because it's easy to go, oh yeah, I see how that happens — you look back in your own life. But it's not that we ever outgrow this. A perfect example is the Darwin Awards. How does it get to the point where someone is actually going to put a rocket in a car and try to launch themselves? These are adults — some very smart, some very educated, who should know better. So bridge the gap for me: how is the guy going around shooting, killing, stealing cars, and robbing places the same thing as the guy who puts a rocket in a vehicle and tries to launch himself?

Some of the people who get Darwin Awards are geniuses, doctors, brilliant in their own right, and in the moment they didn't think clearly. That lack of cost-benefit analysis cost them their lives. So I'll bridge that gap with a couple of examples. Back in 2002 — and you know I do parkour every day as part of my stringent marathon workout — there were guys outside of a Paris district. Parkour actually started when a guy fell off something and they named it after him. Anyway, they're by a car park, there's a gap with a forty-foot drop between two car parks, and one guy walks the ledge while the others egg him on, he jumps the gap and makes it. Like little ducklings following the duck, they all make it, and they go to the pub. At the pub they videotape it, take their selfies, have a couple of drinks. On the way back, with a couple of drinks on board, they say, let's do that again — and the first guy dies. They never saw it coming. You outrun your headlights. There's also a lawyer in Canada — everybody knows the video. What he would do in the conference room was run as fast as he could to the window, jump up, hit it, and say, yeah, these are indestructible windows — welcome to the party. It was a parlor trick he did two or three times a day. On this day he'd already done it in two previous meetings, and on the third meeting he hit the window, the window came out, and he fell. What happens is you start ramping yourself up and you develop this feeling of invincibility. Our great friend Andy Brown wrote Warnings Unheeded — we have a B-52 pilot, Colonel Bud Holland, who pushed that B-52 to its limits over and over. Each time he did it he got this sense that he was invincible, that the hand of God itself was guiding him. That euphoria is short-lived — it's your brain trying to tell you to repeat the behavior. But the problem is we repeat it and push those boundaries until we exceed our own human limitations. So you have a less-educated guy who's cracking and drinking and smoking and stealing cars and finally goes off the rails, or you have someone like Bud Holland — a genius at the top of his game — who exceeds something we all call physics. There's a thing called gravity, Brian, and it'll be around for a while.

That's when I leave that piece of evidence laying out. That's when I forget to close the door or lock the door or shut my garage door and now I get robbed that night, or forget to turn my car lights off because I'm so focused on something else and my battery is dead the next day. That same behavior shows up no matter what the situation is, and we can all fall victim to it. The serial killer one is always interesting because from an HBP and patterns and pattern analysis standpoint, they're all so predictable. But it falls into that first I learn my boundaries, then I test my boundaries, then I push my boundaries framework. Our guy at the beginning in Arizona probably never left the neighborhoods and cities he'd been operating in his whole life — he stayed within his area. Same thing with John Wayne Gacy — he stayed within a geographical location where he knew and felt comfortable. Compare that to Ted Bundy, who started all the way in the Pacific Northwest and made his way all the way across the country down to Florida. As he starts pushing his boundaries and his operating environment and his level of organization, he opens up the aperture a little bit, but he still goes back to exactly what he knows — the method, the mode of how he actually does it. He's still going to fall back on that. Does that kind of make sense?

You nailed it. And if you're an HR person, a parent, or a cop listening out there, listen closely. The first example Brian gave about the criminal episode — that individual was out of control where their chemicals kept giving their brain the happy head and they went until they skidded to a stop somewhere. When we're talking about serial killers, we're talking about a psychopathy where the cognitive control mechanisms are working perfectly. They're not enraged, out-of-control people — they're working perfectly, except they were wired with a very disturbed goal. So separate the two; it's a distinct separation. And Brian, I think psychologically, specifically in abhorrent psychology, an argument could be made that many of those serial killers made those little mistakes along the way because they had an urge to be found out — I can't fully be appreciated unless you know it was me that did it.

Yeah.

And so Dennis Rader, BTK, he lost the bubble. They weren't looking for him anymore. Ten, twelve years of killing had gone by and he was so good, they were no closer to finding him. So what did he do? He started writing messages. He started saying, hey, I'm over here.

And that gets into a whole other area we could do an entire podcast on. That's still a version of what you're calling the happy head, right? Each one of those — I still need that rush, I need that reaction out of people, because I get something out of that — that chemical release in my body that says yeah, this is exactly what I want. And then it continues from there, so if I lack that impulse control, it's going to be harder for me to come back. I'm going to continue to push those boundaries.

Exactly right. So listen, most people control their actions and relatively few people have their interactions end in violence of any kind, even raised voices. Even though they're confronted with disappointment or frustration or anger on a daily basis, they cope with it. Then we've got the other set of humans, the serial killer ilk, that have a psychopathy — they're driven by the happy head, they get aroused by this very specific sort of thing, and so they're going to search that out. That also becomes gambling, sexual addiction, drugs, and all that other stuff. And then the final one being the people that all of a sudden go in and rob that car at gunpoint, get that rush, and then they're standing in line at McDonald's still living that rush and they go, I ain't paying for this. The next thing is a cop pulling in behind him and now he's going to flee. But if we understand what we're dealing with, we can predict what's likely going to happen.

So that's the general hard question here to be addressed — yeah, I get it, but so what? Meaning, how do I do that in real time? How do I determine in the situation whether this person is pushing their boundaries and going to continue to push them, or this person is doing what normal humans do — they're testing things, they're annoying, they're being loud at the bar and they're not really going to do anything? Like, I'm standing in a 7-Eleven grabbing a six-pack of beer on the way home and someone comes in to rob the place — how do I determine if this guy's trying to get some cash and get out as quickly as possible, or no, this guy wants blood, this ain't just about a robbery?

But you just said it. You just gave a perfect example for the people listening. And you forget sometimes that when you function at such a high level as you are, that other people aren't.

That's what the doctors call me — a high-functioning alcoholic. Is that what you mean? No. And I always like to point out that in any of the examples we bring up, this affects all humans. Those are two great examples from seemingly opposite ends of the spectrum. You had Colonel Bud Holland — highly trained pilot, an expert in his field with thousands of hours in that aircraft — and he continued to push until he outran his headlights. And then at the other end of the spectrum you have the guy in Arizona with no education, no training, no critical thinking whatsoever. Two individuals seemingly at very opposite ends of whatever spectrum you want to put them on — intellect, education, training — and yet they fall victim to the same electrochemical neurotransmitters. They fall into the same category for us of happy head because it affects all of us. We talk a lot about behavior and criminals and specifically nefarious behavior out of all these folks — we see it and always take it from that perspective, but we forget our own. And you keep bringing it back to children because it's a perfect example of what we always talk about in class, right? First I learn my boundaries, then I test my boundaries, and then I push my boundaries. Even your parkour guy, your Bud Holland — they're testing their boundaries now, and they're starting to get to that level of pushing it and pushing it. That's the difference between a guy who hits that limit and goes, okay, there's the line, I know how far I can go, versus someone who hits that line and goes, okay, where's the next one? Does that kind of make sense?

You're right on. Self-control and impulse control are both very related but distinct different things. Brian, if I don't have a parent or a mentor or a teacher or a coach, I'm more likely to fall for the happy head. Because if I have that one person on the ledge next to me going, dude, it's a long way down to the pool and I don't think you're going to make it, you'll give yourself the gift of time and distance and rethink it. Now, you may still jump, but the likelihood that you're going to engage in this ongoing risky behavior is less likely. You remember back in the 80s — Dan Rather on the news all the time, and he runs into two guys that walk up to him and say, hey Kenneth, what's the frequency? They're pushing him around, and Dan Rather, this brilliant guy, thinks it's some kind of a gag. Then they beat him almost to death and he's in intensive care, and ten years later REM comes out with What's the Frequency, Kenneth. That was Dan Rather — his inability to see right in front of him that the situation spun out of control and that these two men were going to beat him and rob him. That's what happened in Arizona. People didn't see that this cataclysmic event, this snowball coming downhill, was gaining momentum and that it was going to crash somewhere. And we see that in serial killers too. Ridgway dumped the body, the cops see the body and they're getting closer to Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer. They go down to check out that body and there is the decomposing body along with three previous victims he had murdered. He was meticulous in his planning and his dumping and how he would return to scenes, yet he got so ramped up near the end that he forgot. And Gacy, putting kids in his basement — he made sure he separated them, dug, put quicklime on the bodies, did all these things. But near the end he started ramping up and he forgot it. It turned into a garden down there and he was stacking kids like cordwood. What we're talking about is that one incident drives the next and then drives the next, and before I know it I'm out of control. It's how do I predict likely outcomes in all these situations — that's what we always teach and what we're going for. You don't know what's going on in someone's life when you walk in. Maybe you just walked into a robbery by chance, or maybe this is robbery number three on a spree — you don't know where you fall in that. And that's no different from not knowing where someone's at when they're going to do their parkour trick. Have they attempted this three times and nailed it successfully? We see that with private companies too — hey, this was a really good product or investment, let's do that again, maybe we can do a little bit more. They start going down this path and now they're off of their actual mission. They have mission creep and eventually it's going to catch up with them because they didn't account for something. That's exactly how serial killers get caught — Dahmer and all these guys. It's never the thing they always did; it's always something they overlooked because they fell into that rush of dopamine and adrenaline and oxytocin, all these very powerful chemicals they were feeling. The function isn't that high, Brian. Lofty, but trust me, it's aspirational. When you're talking about something as simple as a geographic profile — all of the crimes that were committed in Mesa, Arizona, were linked to things this person knew. So I'm not paying for the barbecue, and I'm going to continue to do that until I get caught. We get that. The second part is we have to understand that it's difficult to interpret these without context. In the serial killer realm, the serial killer is going to pursue a bandwidth of likely victims. There are very few serial killers that fight outside of their lane — it's the race, it's this type. Like Dahmer — if you looked at early Dahmer, he was preying on the gay community, so it was likely that Dahmer was coming from the gay community. But they didn't connect that quick enough. Pardon me — non-COVID related symptoms here.

I'm just glad it's not COVID.

The idea, Brian, is that the violence in serial killers is channeled in a very specific direction with a very specific target. So a guy walks in to rob the liquor store and closes and locks the door behind him and starts pulling down the blinds — that person might be there a while. If a person kills, they're going to tend to kill again. The longer it is between the time that the person kills and not killing means you're likely to see the end of their killing spree. A person that goes in, shoots up the place, accidentally shoots the counter person, shoots a cop on the way out — the longer it goes from that last shooting, the better chance you have of catching that person. They're either going to commit suicide, give up, or barricade, but they're likely not going to shoot it out with you. Why? Because they're different from the person that goes in and says, I have a grudge — you pissed me off — and decides to walk into the DMV with a gun and target the people that made it hard for him to get a plate for his trailer. That's the targeted nature, the geographic nature — that's where we came up with the domains. When people operate across more than one of those domains, that's likely going to be the answer, whereas a serial killer tends to operate within one domain but do it very specifically.

That's a good way to look at even something in progress like that. I immediately thought of the Las Vegas shooting — Steven Paddock. You can take a look during that attack and say, all right, we're coming under very accurate sniper fire from an elevated position in this hotel room. Even in real time you can go, this guy isn't just going to stop and throw his hands up. He's not there to get a message out. He's not there to do anything beyond killing people right there in the moment, and he's not going to stop until someone kills him. Just by the method of attack versus what you brought up — what you see a lot — is the rage attacks. It's like the Michael Douglas Falling Down movie where I've just had enough and I'm going to take it out on all the wrongs in the world. But there's a different type — more like an injustice collector kind of thing.

Precisely. An injustice collector is like a grenade exploding in all directions.

And that's not what we saw with Paddock.

That's not what we saw with Paddock.

And that's what I'm saying — even in real time, is this person doing this to every single person they encounter? Like the guy in Arizona. What did he do? It was just 100% at-bank thinking: I shot these people, now I need to get out of here, so I need a car. Got a car. Ran out of gas. Now I need another one. It's very primal. There's no organization, there's no sophistication to it. So he's going to continue that behavior. Versus if I took the time to get a certain hotel room overlooking a certain area, and then I have this luggage full of ammo — he took time to buy luggage to fit his guns. Think of that in comparison. He had to put a lot of planning into it. You can tell right away if there's some level of planning involved in what I'm observing, and that's an organization level I need to be concerned about — because that means they have a plan and I might not have one. So it's the same thing as the example of the guy walking into the 7-Eleven when you're in there. Did they walk right up to the cash register and they don't even see that you're in there because they're so mission-focused? That's very different than — like you said — walk in, lock the door, start putting stuff down, and start ordering people around. Same situation, two completely different likely outcomes.

Remarkably, Mesa, Arizona, just a couple of days ago — four people in a stolen ride driving down the street in broad daylight, see a guy walking with a backpack. The backseat passenger gets out, goes over, starts arguing with the guy. Great ATM footage, you can look it up online. The guy says, no, you're not having my backpack. Finally the guy walks away, turns around, starts shooting at him, then walks back over to him. When you double back like that after firing that first shot — once that first shot is fired, the whole dynamic of that situation changed. That person on the ground ended up being shot and having his backpack taken anyway, and then the attacker went on to more criminal episodes. Don't turn a robbery into a homicide. There's a whole bunch of people out there doing at-bank training — if I had my own weapon and if I have this and if I had that. Defense is three-to-one odds. Five to one in urban. I get all the numbers, but it's different when somebody stops a car in broad daylight, there's four people in the car, and a big guy comes over to you and says give up the backpack. That backpack is going on the insurance report. You get what I'm trying to say? If I come into your store and I sense there's going to be resistance — and I'm already amped up on all these electrochemical neurotransmitters — and I crank off a round, the second round is going to be easier than the first, and the third round easier than the second. Let me put it in your context of being a Marine — and happy Marine Corps birthday. You're on patrol and the guy up front snags a root with his toe, trips, and fires off a three-round burst. Everyone behind him takes contact — yelling contact — and they're shooting. I've seen that with cops before. We're going up on a scene and one of the cops tripped and fired off a round — thank God didn't blow his own head off — and as soon as he fired, there's a crescendo of violence, and all of a sudden it ended and I hear, "My bad." Those things happen. If we're already predisposed to do that, then all at-bank training must have a left-of-bank component — because if it doesn't, Brian, you're not going to anticipate those boundaries. You're not going to see when those tea leaves start coming together and going, this is a protracted criminal episode and this guy's not going to stop until he kills everybody or himself.

That's another good example of how we fall into getting the happy head. We were so amped up going into that situation that as soon as someone cracked a round off, all of a sudden everyone thinks, oh my gosh, this is it, we're in it. And just for everyone listening — it's a descriptive device, the happy head. We're just describing a general—

A psychological profile.

We use that because it's easy to remember and it's easy to fall into and it's easy to see all the time. Especially when you have those little spree criminals who didn't plan the attack — they've become the happy head. That could be out of excitement, it could be out of fear, it could be a number of things. But you put it great when you said once I fire one round, it's a lot easier to fire two or three or four. Once I kill one person, that's it. Once I rob one vehicle — I learned my boundaries, I test my boundaries, I push my boundaries. And now I've learned, oh, I can do this, I can shoot someone, even if I've never done it before.

Sunday, snowy parking lot. Dad's car. First time you get the 500 four-barrel and you do a complete loop and everything's wonderful. Then you go get all your friends and you do it again. Then you get all your friends on top of those friends — they're standing and watching and cheering. And now all of a sudden the only light pole in the entire parking lot becomes part of your grill. You just don't think those things are going to happen because you can't anticipate likely spirals in the moment. So you have to create these likelihoods that are going to occur and do a cost-benefit analysis — and you've got to be able to do it faster than the situation arises. People overeat, Brian, and then they go, oh my god, I've gotten fat, overnight I've got diabetes and I can't do anything about this. It didn't happen overnight. It happened over a protracted period of time. We're talking about people whose impulse control and self-control is so poor that it tends to become violent. But a situation doesn't have to be violent. Happy head can be those kids in that car spinning a donut, doing a lawn job — that was a popular thing in Detroit when I was a kid — and then all of a sudden you lose control and hit a parked car.

And then you're in the house. You're parked in the living room.

The key to the happy head is knowing that there is such a thing called the happy head, because if I can name it, I can avoid it.

That's a good point, because I've heard other discussions of similar topics and they go down the rabbit hole of impulse control — well, yeah, that's the issue, and because men have more testosterone they're more likely to do it. That's all great, but that doesn't matter. I can't use that information, it doesn't change anything.

We don't walk down a street, go, he's a man, and everybody jumps and hides behind the hedges, right?

You've now described the incident in even far more detail — good job. What does that mean going forward? It's the so what.

How do you play the so what?

How do you play the so what? And that's the idea of understanding what the happy head concept is and how to avoid it through a little bit of critical thinking — is this the right thing, or what you call the cost-benefit analysis. Identifying that person who's got it, and that comes into — it's almost the groove-in-a-record analogy, which for anyone listening who knows what a record is.

Nobody's old enough to remember that.

The idea is there's one groove in the record and it continues to play and continues to go, and that's like seeing someone with a happy head — right there in that groove, in that moment. And it's like, oh, this is going to continue, or possibly escalate, but at least at a minimum continue, because I'm observing someone who's exhibiting no critical thinking skills whatsoever. And I think to pick up on that is the pocket lint we're talking about — oh man, they are just bang thinking right now, literally walking through their environment reacting to everything around them, so therefore you can now predict what the likely outcomes are if you can just look down the street a little farther and see what's coming next at them.

That's it. If we have a bowl of prophylactics on the left and a bowl of alcohol and ice on the right — if condoms are present, people enjoying each other are more likely to use them because they're present, they're visible. If you add to that a modicum of education and perhaps a warning before you go out — hey, before you hump, cover your stump — when you're out and that crocodile's at the door, whatever you're up to, you're likely to use that protection. If the alcohol is in the room, you're just as equally likely to use that alcohol, and the next thing you know it's window pane and blotter acid and speedball and heroin and now you've got nine kids.

It's a slippery slope.

I'm totally serious about that. Your child mind isn't very smart when it comes to stacking the deck and seeing what's likely to come from one night of passion. When you're hugging and kissing, all of those chemicals are in play, Brian, and you add a little bit of alcohol and a little bit of sexy music — the next thing you know clothes are coming off and we're not thinking of putting anything on. If we address that in our training, then it's likely that we'll think and stop and give ourselves a moment of distance and say, hey, we better use one of these precautionary methods. So why is it different than when we're throwing a kid the keys to the car? Why is it different when we're taking our kid to the range and teaching weapon safety? All of those things go hand in hand with the trainer, the mentor, the coach, the parent — we are less likely to fall into those traps. Unless there's mental illness aboard, and sometimes mental health does play into a person. I'll give you an example — the Gabby Giffords shooting, I think that was also Arizona. I wonder if that's why you made that connection. Let's stay the hell out of Arizona this week. I can't think of his name right now, but that kid — that wasn't a political statement he was making. He was a grenade that was ready to explode. He could hear people yelling on the loudspeaker at the mall, drove over there, and said, I'm going to shoot it up. So don't look for motive in these — look for method. If you understand what's playing out ahead of you and you're seeing that the anger has turned into action, that's where your focus should go, that's where your resources should go, so you don't commit too soon.

And again, you brought up the point that there can also be mental health issues or other things on board. So not trying to oversimplify the issue — we're actually just trying to make it easier to identify. I don't have to understand psychopathy or mental health or schizophrenia or learn to identify all that stuff. If I understand when someone's got the happy head right now, that allows me to go, this situation is continuing, or this is going to get worse, or they're not recognizing what's ramping up.

Or they're coming down — that might be enough. That might be enough to save a life.

Right, and that's the idea — just observing that. Can you then formulate a plan of action, or an intervention if it's your job, but at least identifying when someone else is in it, or when you are. And the best part is the same thing you brought up with the kids example — okay, stop right now, I see what you're doing, it's fun, I'm not going to ruin your parade, but let's put a couple of measures in place. Like, I knew Harper was going to jump off those stairs onto her bed — it's got a little spiral staircase that comes up to the loft. I knew it was going to happen, but she's going to do it, so it's like, okay, here's how to do that. I'm going to show you how to do it so that you maintain three points of contact, turn and face where you're going.

Play out the bounce, right? Are there any sharp objects? Inertia, centrifugal force, right?

Turned it into a teachable moment. So now she was okay, and then went through the critical thing — okay, if you land right here, what do you think is going to happen? Oh man, that would hurt. Or, what if you bounce here? Just play the what-if game. So now I know she's going to do it, so now she's doing it safely. And then it also kind of took the fun out of it for her too.

And you're injured — what would you do next? What you're doing, Brian, is you're creating explanatory storylines for events that haven't yet happened, and that's what takes us from the realm of in-the-moment, at-bang, and incorporates the left of bang, the at-bang, the right of bang, near right of bang — and creates a 360 approach to your personal safety.

I think that's a good way to describe it, especially when you've got the kids involved, but we all fall victim to that. So I think that's kind of a good spot to bring it in for a landing on, Greg, unless there was something else you wanted to add about the happy head?

Nope. I coined that phrase because I've got a giant happy head and I'm the dancing bear. I'm an idiot when it comes to that. Brian, you know that I will be the one at the end of the party that breaks the leg and everybody says you should have known better. Now, be safe out there and we both know that the dining scene is going to change.

That's a good point as we're bringing up all these examples, because I continue to fall into the trap all the time.

We've learned nothing, folks.

I'm good at articulating it because I have so many examples of when I've been a jackass. But that's the point of sharing.

That's why we do it here. That's called an excuse, folks.

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